Stamp Collection Valuation

I am keen to sell a stamp collection which is taking up a whole room in my house.

I have seen a couple of online advertisements by companies who say they will make a home visit to perform a valuation. As the collection is too big for me to transport to a valuer, this seems like the only way I will be able to get the collection valued, but I don't know how to tell if these companies can be trusted.

Does anyone have any knowledge or experience of any companies who offer this service?

 

Sorry I have never used such a company but one method is to google the company name and look for any reccomendations or warnings that they might have

 

Maybe a collector you already known online for years or you already dealt with will be willing to give you a visit and help you evaluate your collection, he might get interested buying those as well.

 

No experience in this area with any of these guys; I'd try an auction house first. My inclination would be to avoid the dealers offering to buy your whole collection until the final step of disposing of a stamp collection.

I buy mint US (relatively current) by catalog number to fill in 'holes' in my collection. I pay about 2x face value for mint never hinged (MNH). If I were to try and sell it back to them, expect maybe 60-80% face offer depending on the relative value of the stamps (express mail vs. common postage). Plate blocks - face value at best. Sheets? discounted from face value unless it's topical like sports (football,baseball, basketball), Disney?, scouting, space?, Olympics. If I invest the time and patience, I can sometimes get some of the rarer stamps I'm looking for @ 20-40% of catalog value thru APS circuit books , auctions, or internet sellers.

For all the 'time' consumption, I think you'd do better selling the high cat. value stuff off as single stamps or sets (at least for the more valued ones) on something like eBay or www.stamps2go.com. Just set up a PayPal account where you can take payments.

One dealer I talked to about foreign collections said that he'd break up the collection and sell it off by country (probably after scalping out any high value stamps). There's evidently not a lot of collector demand willing to go out and buy 80,000 stamps already mounted in a set of 28 albums. I mean . . where's the fun in that? It's disconcerting to me that someone will eventually break up my world-wide collection that will probably to be in something like 35 Minkus Master Global volumes by the time I quit collecting or whenever they quit printing supplements for the Master Global albums. You can't buy album sets (commercially) like that anymore.